Science fiction became the business plan. The singularity, Mars colonisation, mind uploading — these are not metaphors. They are funding pitches.
This cluster maps science fiction terms deployed as serious policy or identity rhetoric. When the impossible becomes the inevitable, ideological choices hide behind visionary language.
The question this cluster asks: who benefits from making the future sound inevitable?
Terms in this cluster
Digital Frankenstein
Technology that outgrows its maker and cannot be recalled. The oldest warning in the genre — still running.
The Singularity
The moment AI surpasses human intelligence. Kurzweil set a date. The date keeps moving.
AGI
Artificial General Intelligence — the threshold where the technical and the science-fictional blur into each other.
Transhumanism
The ideology that technology must transcend the human condition. Death as an engineering problem.
Mind Uploading
Digitising consciousness. Living forever in a server. The question of whether that is still you goes unanswered.
Simulation Hypothesis
Bostrom: we probably live in a computer simulation. A philosophical thought experiment that became a talking point for billionaires.
The Matrix
Reference frame for red pill, woke, reality tunnels. A film about liberation, repurposed as recruitment material.
Brave New World
Huxley’s soft control through pleasure. More relevant to platforms than 1984 — and less often cited.
1984
Shorthand for surveillance. Claimed simultaneously by every side of the political spectrum.
Skynet
The AI that decided humanity was the threat. A movie villain that now appears in serious policy debates.
Mars Colonization
Musk’s SF utopia as policy frame. Escape from Earth as a private project.
Cybernetic Collective
Human-machine fusion at the level of society. The collective framing obscures who owns the infrastructure.
Neuralink
Brain-computer interface. The name itself is SF aesthetic — science fiction as brand identity.
Brain-Computer Interface
Direct connection between brain and machine. The technology is real. The implications are still being written.
Doomerism
The belief that technological disaster is inevitable and resistance is futile. Fatalism as a political position.
Longtermism
MacAskill and Ord: the moral weight of the future vastly outweighs the present. A framework that can justify almost anything today.
Mythos Moment
The threshold where a model becomes too dangerous to release. Where science fiction becomes policy reality.
Mimetic Desire
We want what our model wants. Girard named it. Thiel built a business empire on it. Platforms monetise it.
Doom Trolling
The people building it warn you it is dangerous. They did not stop building it. SF as a market mechanism.